The Strange Gifts of God: The Gift of Sacrifice | Part 1

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Well, let's start this uh new series with a question.

Um, this series is called The Strange Gifts of God.

Have you ever received uh a gift, a good gift, uh in a terrible season?

Have you ever received a significant gift in a time of turmoil, difficulty?

Like have you, in seasons very, very busy, have you been given the gift of time and attention from a friend?

Or have you been so stressed and worried and someone pulls you aside and gives you encouragement?

And it can just change like the like immediate atmosphere of life, right?

Uh, a couple of months ago, I was in this difficult season um as a pastor.

They they happen quite often, actually.

You just feel like you feel weak or you feel insignificant.

And I got in the mail an Amazon gift card and a note from somebody here at the church.

Now, at any other time, Amazon gift card and a note, you might think, you know, I mean, is it the greatest gift in the world?

You know, no, right?

It's it can be it can seem maybe just insignificant.

However, it came at the right time and from the right person and with the right intention of encouraging me in ministry and in life to Ali and I.

It changed my season, man.

Just this little strange gift coming through, changing kind of the temperature of my life.

Have you ever been there?

You know?

Yeah, this is kind of sometimes how God operates, right?

Like the very moments that we think there's nothing to receive from God is actually the precise moment there's something in the mail on his behalf for us.

They come at the strangest times.

And oftentimes we are so buried in our own experience that we are not taking the invitations and the presentations that God is giving to us in such strange times.

And that's what this series is all about, the strange gifts of God.

Because we live in strange times.

We live in chaotic times.

We live in times that it's very hard to be a human being.

And having just, you know, come out of a year of crises of various kinds, it's important and wise for us to ask like, what strange gifts might God be giving to us in this time?

Because that is what the book of Acts ends like.

We've been studying the book of Acts for since February.

The book of Acts is the fifth book in your New Testament.

It tells the story and history of the early church, right after the four gospels.

This book comes and it uh tells wild tales.

We've studied all of them.

If you've done our Bible reading plan, you've read all of them.

28 chapters of crazy tales of the early church, the very beginning of the Jesus movement is being unpacked through these chapters.

And we are here at the close.

Uh, for these next four weeks, this series will cover to uh to the end of chapter 28, the very end of the book.

We will we have arrived at the end since February.

We've been studying this book, and here we are.

And the book of Acts ends in a strange way.

You know, the Gospels they end with this triumphant uh climactic ending.

Jesus Christ raises from the dead.

You really can't get better than that, right?

As far as a story goes, the story of Jesus is a remarkable narrative.

The story of the church, you might expect to end in a similar fashion.

Throughout the whole book, they're doing a lot of the things Jesus did.

Jesus taught, the apostles teach.

Jesus healed people, the apostles heal people.

Jesus uh uh taught with tremendous authority and prophecy.

The disciples do the same.

And yet I hear at the end, uh nothing really happens of great uh enormous importance.

Instead, it's actually quite anticlimactic because this whole time, the book of Acts, in around chapter, I don't know, 16 or so, the book of Acts starts to shift and turn into the book of the Acts of the Apostle Paul.

So the title of the book is The Acts of the Apostles, but slowly over time it turns into the Acts of the Apostle Paul.

And we focus on this man for the closing, I don't know, 10 or so chapters, 10 or 12 chapters.

And his story, the whole time it's he's going to Rome to get uh justice on his behalf because he's been accused of various things and he appeals to various courts and he has mistrials, he gets arrested.

Uh over these next eight chapters, he's going to have misfortune after misfortune after misfortune.

And the end of the book of Acts is Paul sitting in house arrest, welcoming people and teaching them about the kingdom of God, and the book ends.

I'll spoil the ending for you.

There it is.

I'll spoil the ending because it's not really that suspenseful.

But the book of Acts is a lot like your life.

As much as we want to live this grand story, as much as we want to be this kind of person that a movie could be made out of, life doesn't really work that way.

At the end, life is various circumstances that we try to be faithful in.

And the Lord operates within those difficulties, and life sometimes works like the end of Paul's story here.

Like, think we're going towards a goal, we're going towards something, and there's a lot of missteps and misfortunes, and Paul's gonna be shipwrecked, and he's gonna be uh have mistrials and have to go to an appeal to another court and face injustice and be imprisoned and face adversity and have all these difficulties along his way.

The book of Acts is not a tall tale.

It is not a novel, it's a mirror.

It's like looks like our life sometimes, that things don't work out always the way that we want them to.

And could it be that the very moment that we think that God is absent and not giving us any gifts is perhaps the time he's giving us strange gifts, strange invitations in strange times that we have to kind of be attentive to.

And could our life learn, uh could we learn something from the life of Paul?

And let's be quick to say this at the top of the series.

Paul's gonna go through various trials, like I said.

Not every trial that Paul faces is from God.

Now, God brings us trials sometimes, but I want to be quick to say that not everything that happens in this world is God's will.

You know, not everything that happens in Paul's life is God's will.

Um, not everything that happens in this world is from the intention of God, but the intention of his enemy.

There is an enemy.

And there also are rebels, active agents, human beings that are doing terrible things.

And a lot of the things we think God is doing in this world, it's actually us.

And we'll explore that through the rest of this series, but let's be quick to say that all the things that Paul, you know, encounters, it's it's not always uh what you think it is.

And today, Paul, he has a difficult circumstance before him.

In the book of Acts chapter 20.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

If you've got a Bible, you can head there with me.

Acts chapter 20, there's a difficult circumstance Paul Paul is in.

Acts 20 · chapter mention

He has to leave a community that he loves.

He's been there for three years, he's been pouring in, being a faithful pastor and a minister.

He's been giving and giving and giving, and now he has to leave, and he knows he hasn't really received the benefits of his work.

Like he's been planting, but the fruit hasn't come yet.

And he gives this farewell address to the uh the church in Ephesus, this church he has planted and loved and grown with, and he's got to go.

And it's this difficult circumstance.

But within the difficult circumstance, he invites the leadership of this church to a strange gift of God.

And that strange gift is the word sacrifice.

That as much as we feel tired or weary, Paul says, we are here to give and to sacrifice, to give something up.

You know what sacrifice is, right?

Giving up something important for something else of infinite importance.

Paul drives home that it is better to give and give and give than to wait to receive, receive, receive.

Here's his thesis, I would say.

It's kind of at the close of the speech.

We'll go there and we'll jump back to the beginning, okay?

Acts 20, verse 34 says this.

Acts 20:34

Paul gives this farewell address, and in it he says, You yourselves, you know that these hands ministered to my necessities and to those who were with me.

Again, Acts 20, here's verse 35.

In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

Do you believe that?

Let's just start there.

Do you believe that it's more blessed to give than receive?

Blessed?

What does that mean?

Well, flourishing for your life, good for your life, that you would feel more connected to God when you give than when you receive.

Do you believe that?

Even when things are not ideal, Paul says, him leaving, a life of sacrifice is better than a life of self-indulgence.

Even when things are not ideal, a life of sacrifice is better than a life of self-indulgence.

And to that I say, really?

Do you believe that?

Because as an American, we're about to celebrate 4th of July.

I don't believe that.

As an American, I believe that the more I consume and the more I receive, the better my life is.

That's the entire operation of this civilization.

To consume and to get what is yours, right?

I I don't know if I look at this that I would really believe this all the time, you know, plain and simple.

This is a strange gift from God to tell you that it's better for you to give away$5,000 than to receive it.

That's Jesus' argument.

That actually, whatever you are given, it's better to give it away than to hold it onto yourself for yourself.

That to sacrifice things is better.

Well, we have a lot of problems with that.

One is we are greedy, like I mentioned.

I'm greedy.

Like I look at that verse and I'm like, yes and amen.

And then I see a Tesla and I'm like, maybe not, you know?

Um, like maybe it's better to get stuff than to than to give.

Um, but also when we have given, we've been burned, right?

Like, like we've given and given and given and not gotten stuff back from our gifts and our sacrifices, right?

So not only do we have a problem with it because we're greedy, we have a problem of it because we are afraid of the great 21st century disease, burnout.

Right?

We are afraid that when we give and give and give, we're gonna burn out.

You have you heard this word?

I hear it all the time.

I I hear the word burnout all the time.

It's in ministry, it's in secular workplace, I talk with you guys about that word a lot.

It it is something that is seriously affecting our world.

Um in May, uh, yeah, I think, yes, in May, the um Jill Lapore, she's a historian at Harvard, she's also a staff writer at the New Yorker, she wrote this New Yorker piece on the history of that word, burnout.

And the history for her in her study begins in 1970.

So it's not that long we've been talking about burnout.

Now, being overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, fraught with anxiety, all that has existed for all of human time.

But this term burnout in particular, she traces it back to 1970.

She says this that around the world, three out of five workers say that they're burned out.

But in 2020, a US study put that figure at three and four.

75% of people are saying they're burned out.

There's even a book that came out last year by a millennial.

The title is Can't Even.

That's the end of the title.

Uh you're like, can't even what?

Yeah, it was written by a millennial, so the English is like third grade.

So I'm a millennial, I can say it, okay?

Uh can't even.

Here's the subtitle Um How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.

Like our generation was is known for maxing out, for having batteries we can't recharge, for having no ability to recover.

And so we have a term for it called burnout.

It is into this culture, at this time, in this moment, that Jesus Christ's word drops in to us today, which says to the burnout generation.

It is more blessed to give than to receive.

So there's something here, there's something for us.

And my argument today will be that most of us are sacrificing in the wrong way.

We are giving for the wrong reasons.

We are giving up our lives over and over again to the wrong things, and it's leading to burnout.

And through God's word, we're going to see that there is actually a right way to sacrifice here through Paul's final speech to the Ephesian church.

It is into this culture that we see that sacrifice, um, there is a way to sacrifice rightly.

We're gonna look at this: sacrificing for the right purpose, sacrificing from the right posture and with the right people.

The purpose, the posture, the people.

Let's get into it.

The sacrificing for the right purpose.

Paul is giving this closing testament and going to say, Jesus and his kingdom are the right purposes to sacrifice for.

Sacrificing outside of those purposes will mostly lead to a kind of burnout.

This is Paul's final will and testament.

In the literary landscape of the Bible, this little speech, uh, the literature is called a testament.

Uh, it's like back in Genesis 49, when Jacob is dying, he's giving his final testament to his family.

It's kind of this revered figure giving their final remarks of instruction and importance before they leave or die.

And Paul is leaving and he gives this testament, and he said, and what are his farewell instructions?

Here's how he begins, Acts 20, verse 18.

Acts 20:18

You yourselves, you know how I lived among you the whole time.

This is Paul talking to the Ephesian church.

From the first day I set foot in Asia, I was serving the Lord with all humility with tears, trials that happened to me throughout the plots of the Jews.

How I did not shrink back from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you in public and from house to house, testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance towards God and of faith in our Lord Jesus.

And now, behold, I'm going to Jerusalem, constrained by the Spirit, not knowing what will happen to me there.

Look at what Paul says, underline these verses, pay close attention.

I lived among you.

Okay, Paul was not commuting into the church in Ephesus, he was with the people.

And look at what he says: serving the Lord, primarily.

He wasn't primarily serving the people.

He was living with them, but he he was directing his sacrifice to the Lord, constrained by the Spirit, testifying about Jesus.

Paul's saying, everything that I was doing was about Jesus.

Everything that I was doing was directed towards Jesus.

And the right purpose, the direction, the motivation, that's like at the heart of the center of biblical teaching, right?

Everywhere from Deuteronomy 6, verse 4, when the people of God are hearing from Yahweh, the God of the Bible, the living one.

Deuteronomy 6:4

You know, God says, uh, Moses says to the people, hear that the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all your mind, with all of your strength.

Jesus will tack on to that in uh Matthew 22.

At the end, he says, he's asked what the greatest commandment is, and he repeats that commandment.

He says, the most important thing you can do is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6, uh, chapter 6, verse 33, he says, Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you.

That verse, by the way, is in the context of teaching on anxiety.

To seek God first, to direct our attention, to give us a purpose.

And many of you today, this morning, wherever you're hearing this, you are burnt out because you are headed into a purposeless place with your sacrifice.

You're bringing it to the wrong altar.

Okay?

You're you're you're you're you're bowing down and sacrificing for that which will never sacrifice back to you.

And the only way to be truly satisfied in our sacrifice is to give to that which will always out give us.

That's what we're expecting when we're giving all the time to friendships, to marriage, family, work.

We are expecting if we give, we will be given something in return.

But the problem with that is nothing in this world will give back to you what you expect of it.

Your career will never die for you.

Your family, as much as you give to your family, they will not give back to you what you expect them to give you because we're busted up and broken human beings, that our expectations of other people are often way too large, and then we don't communicate those expectations to those people, and that's why we're disappointed all the time.

Friendships, all of these things, nothing will give back to us.

This in you know, the entire tech apparatus, a lot of you work in tech or in businesses that are here to make money.

Like at the end of the day, if we are sacrificing for the large tech culture here at Silicon Valley, we will always give more to it than it will give back to us.

I mean, at best, they're gonna give you stock options.

Okay, at worst, they will suck your will to live and take you away from your family.

Okay, that's like, but do you see what I'm saying?

If if if you're giving and you're giving for something on the other end of that sacrifice to give it back to you, you will constantly be in despair.

And you'll burn out, you'll burn out.

And many of you, you are burnt out because you are focused in a in the wrong direction.

You can serve the church with the wrong purpose, you know?

As pastors are not clear from this.

In fact, we are notoriously manipulative in this area.

That we would serve so that we would be acknowledged, we would preach so that we would be noticed, we would do ministry so that people would like us, right?

If there's a so that on the other end of the sacrifice, you'll always be burning out and disappointed.

Because nothing in this life will give back to you what you give to it.

And you know what?

This is the good news that the gospel drops in is that when Paul says I was serving the Lord, I was constrained by the Spirit.

I was giving to this church for the purposes of the kingdom of God.

This is what the good news of the gospel does to our life.

We do not give to God in hopes that he will bless us.

We give to God because he has blessed us.

And you see, we don't have to sacrifice and cross our fingers and hope if God will outgive us, because he already has.

Do you know the gospel?

The good news of the Christian faith is that God has laid his life down for you.

He has already given it all.

And so, Christians, the only difference in our minds switches is that we don't work for approval, we work from it.

We don't sacrifice in hopes that God would love us, we sacrifice with the succinct and absolute knowledge that he already has, with the complete commitment to the idea of the love of God, that the love of God would root us so deeply that we can freely work in the tech industry without needing approval, and we can freely pastor churches because we don't need approval, and we can serve in the church, not hoping that somebody in the church would notice how godly we are, but we can serve because we know God already loves us.

And we're free to do all of these things and to sacrifice freely because we are serving from the right purpose.

And this purpose of the gospel is what should ground you and root you and keep you, keep burnout at bay.

Keep it back a little bit because this is what God has done.

He's already given it to you, and therefore the mindset of giving is totally different, and you can receive the word of Christ.

It is better to give than receive.

I know this because God did it himself.

He's not instructing us as a teacher, he's showing us through his very life, his own testimony.

And it's when that sits in us that actually uh something starts to change within a human being, right?

Uh, when the gospel hits us, and when we start sacrificing for the right purpose, we actually develop the right posture.

And that's the second thing is that we need to sacrifice from the right posture of humility and courage.

Look at Paul, look at this man's words.

These are actually remarkable.

Acts 20, verse 24.

Acts 20:24

He continues his speech.

But, he says, I do not account my life of any value, nor as precious to myself, if only that I may finish the course and the ministry that I receive from the Lord Jesus.

To testify to the gospel of the grace of God, and now behold, I know that none of you among whom I have gone about proclaiming the kingdom will see my face again.

He's like, We're ne we're never gonna see each other again.

Therefore, I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink back from declaring the whole counsel of God.

There are very few people that can speak this way.

So many of us do not have the beautiful combination in this paragraph of humility.

And courage.

Humility, I do not account my life of any value.

Verse 24.

Courage, verse 27.

I did not shrink back from declaring the whole counsel of God.

Many of us go through seasons where we develop humility, but we lack courage.

So we're just sheepish.

And then many of us go through seasons where we have tremendous courage and we're bold, but we have no humility.

So we become kind of a jerk.

But here, hidden within this, is a beautiful posture of humility and courage.

How did he get there?

Well, I think in Paul's life, we see two things.

I think Paul overvalued his character development, and I think he undervalued his self.

He overvalued his character development and he undervalued himself.

I want to encourage you to overvalue the development of your character.

Paul says, I was here to finish the course and my ministry.

He separates the two ideas.

What is that verse?

Um that's verse 24.

He's here to finish the course and fulfill his ministry.

So the course for Paul is not his ministry.

He separates the two ideas.

Two distinct ideas.

Finishing the course for Paul looks like something else.

It's larger than the ministry.

He also wants to finish the ministry, but he wants to finish the course.

What is the course?

Paul talks about it all the time in his letters.

Running the race with Jesus, continuing to walk with Jesus Christ, developing Christ-likeness in his walk with him, receiving the gospel, the sacrifice of God, that God has loved him and that the love of God would transform who he was to a person of great humility and great courage.

And he puts so much value on the development of his character.

Have you thought about your character a lot?

Most of us think about our personality.

You know the difference between these two things, right?

Your personality is your presented self.

It is your strength finder.

It is your Myers-Briggs.

Are you an introvert or an extrovert?

It is your Enneagram.

You're getting my personality right now.

It is my presented self.

The only way you really understand who I am, my character, which is your actual self, is if you actually get to know me.

Then you'll see if I'm really a jerk or not, right?

But like right now, my presented self is managed into a place where you can hear it and see it, and you're like, oh, cool, right?

But the more you get to know me, you're gonna actually know me.

That's my character.

And in our world today, you can guess which one is more valued.

Through the tests we take, through the kinds of company cultures we cultivate, the self-help books that exist are all there to manipulate your personality, to present yourself to be a person you are actually not.

And this will burn you out.

To constantly try to present yourself as somebody you are not is a precise failure, uh precise recipe for failure.

This will bring us to a point of burnout because we're constantly trying to prove to somebody else who we are not.

The gospel balloons our character so much in a healthy way that it makes us uh blur the lines between character and personality.

Who you present yourself to be ends up being the person you actually are.

Because you're humbled every day by God's gracious love on your behalf.

Because Christianity is not about how cool and godly you are and how selfless you are and how sacrificial you are.

It is about how selfless and sacrificial Jesus Christ is.

All of the world rotates on his existence and his glory and his importance.

And when you decenter yourself out of that and realize that this world is not about you, and it is about him, and everything you are here to do is to develop the likeness of Jesus of humility and courage, slowly and slowly and slowly through the grace of God and many missteps, you become the kind of person you were always made to be, which was free.

Completely free.

You know who's free?

Children.

My son Jude is 20 months old.

He's the freest person I know.

Why?

Because the line is blurred between his character and his personality.

It's the same thing.

Who he actually is is who he presents himself to the world.

That's why children do the most obnoxious and embarrassing things in public.

Because it's only the course of your adult life that you learn to hide.

The only difference between a child and an adult, Tim Keller has said, is the ability to hide.

To hide who you actually are.

The gospel brings you out from hiding, creates a vulnerable, humble self, and you don't have to worry about presenting because who you actually are before God is accepted and loved, and that leads you to live a courageous life, completely free.

Free from the anxieties of what people will think about you, and that leads you to a place of continuing to give and give and give because you realize this.

In my giving, I am being humbled, I am being nurtured, and my character is being developed, and because of that, I can continue to give.

Some of you think that you're burning out, but your character is just being refined.

Like you think you're too busy, but God's just growing your capacity.

Now, I want to be careful with this because some of y'all need to like quit things, okay?

You do.

You need to like take a day off and you do.

You're burning out.

But others of you, you've got to discern with the Holy Spirit.

I can't do this for you.

You got to discern with the Holy Spirit, you gotta go to the prayer team, you gotta receive prayer, you gotta be in community to understand this.

Maybe you're not burning out, maybe you are just changing and becoming more humble, more helpful, more generous, and to subvert and skirt away from the character development God is doing would not be the course for your life that I would recommend as a pastor.

As a pastor, perhaps what you're going through is developing you to become somebody that you need to be.

Those of you who are parents, you understand this, right?

You can quit your job.

You can't really quit being a parent.

So you just kind of keep going.

And you slowly realize as your children continue to give you difficulties and you're sacrificing, and you give to them way more than they will give back to you, you realize, oh, something's happening in me.

And you start to overvalue your character development in a healthy way, and you start to realize this is how God is working in my life.

Paul overvalues his character development and he undervalues his self.

Do you know what he says?

He says, I did not account my life of any value.

Paul saw himself as replaceable.

By the way, for the record, I would consider Paul's life very valuable, okay?

If we're doing fantasy draft picks of New Testament characters, I think he goes second.

Like Jesus for sure, number one.

But like, dude, Paul is like legit.

Like, I would not undervalue his life.

But he didn't see it that way.

Everyone was like, Paul, you're so great.

You're teaching such great things, you're so wise.

They weep later as he leaves, they love him.

But he goes, I'm repl I'm replaceable.

I did not account my life of any value.

I mean, that is not a depressive person, that is a free person.

A person who can speak that freely to go, I didn't, I don't count my life, I'm replaceable in the areas that I that culture would make me think I'm irreplaceable.

Remember when I was a young pastor, 23, I was newly married, no, no kids, not much ministry experience at all.

Somebody came to me and said, Chris, I don't know, I need to say this to you.

You need to know that you are replaceable in every area of your life except for your family.

And this was before children and right into marriage.

I think what he was saying, like, even as a son, like even if you're not married or don't have a family family, like even as a son, a brother, a cousin, um, certainly as a parent, right?

Like, I think what he saw in me was a propensity towards crafting a personality and a skill set that would be successful in ministry while leaving my character behind.

And he wanted to humble me for a second and just go, dude, Chris, people, other people can preach, dude.

Like, I know you think that you're special or whatever, but at the end of the day, you're not the special snowflake that you were trained up in this world to think you are.

And that's great news.

I find that incredibly freeing that I'm just like you guys.

Like we're just human.

And that humble posture of undervaluing yourself in that healthy way, it makes you realize we're we don't have to be headed for burnout if we hold our life that loosely.

And we can step into service and step out of service and step into life, like certain opportunities and step out of certain opportunities.

See, because then it changes.

Like then we go to work.

It's not like we quit quit our jobs, but we go to work more free.

We go to work because we're not hoping for approval.

We're sacrificing for the right purpose, and we're also in the right posture.

We know, hey, look, I can be replaced.

I'm just gonna do my best while I'm here and stay humble and know my character is being developed.

And yes, it's hard at work, but I know God is growing my capacity right now, and I'm gonna push through.

It's a free life.

That's a very, very beautiful life.

Well, how do we know that we're on track with this, right?

How how will we know that we have the right posture and the right purpose?

Paul, finally, Paul will say, you sacrifice with the right people.

It will be the community that holds you accountable to the posture and the purposes of Jesus Christ.

You cannot do this alone.

And we talk about this all the time, but let's put some fresh eyes to it.

Paul says at the end of his sermon, if you've got your actual Bible open, I don't think it's in the bulletin, but um, Acts 20, 28, right after the this the portion we just read, Paul starts warning these leaders and he goes, pay very careful attention to the kinds of people that are gonna come in and out of this church.

Because he says, There are going to be, he says, after my departure, fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock.

And from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things to draw the disciples away from me.

He says, Look, people will come into the church and into your life that will flip the word of Jesus.

And the word of Jesus is it is better to give than receive.

And someone's gonna come along saying, It's better to receive than give, dude.

And so Paul says, Be very careful who you are sacrificing alongside.

Who are you with?

Be very, very careful.

Paul ends his remarks, and this is the scene, Acts 20, verse 36.

Acts 20:36

When he had said these things, he, Paul, he knelt down and prayed with them all.

And there was much weeping on the part of all.

They were sorrowful because of the word they had spoken, because he said they would not see each other again, and they accompanied him to the ship.

Notice what Paul does.

He kneels with these people and they all pray together.

At the end of this difficult circumstance, they receive this strange gift of God together.

This strange gift that says, man, it it is better to give than receive.

This strange gift they receive together and they kneel and they pray.

Do you notice this?

It's right here, it's right in the text.

The community has the right purpose?

They're praying.

And don't they have the right posture?

They're kneeling.

Who are you kneeling alongside?

And who?

To whom are the are you kneeling towards?

Because I think a lot of us surround ourselves with people that are divisive, they're gossipy, they're bad leaders, they're selfish bosses, they're just bad teammates at our work or in our life, and because of that community that we've developed, they're pointing us in a terrible direction and with an awful posture of pride and self-indulgence and selfishness.

And we wonder why we're burning out.

It's because we've surrounded ourselves with a community that is the antithesis of this teaching from God's word.

What would it look like for you to kneel alongside other believers for a season focused on the right purpose and with the right posture?

It will change you.

It will change you.

I see it change people here at Awakening all the time to dedicate to one another through humility and the purposes of God.

And as you kneel towards together, communion's a wonderful reminder for us to end on here.

Is that you know these people are kneeling and praying, and well, who are they kneeling and praying to, right?

They're kneeling and praying to the God of the Bible.

And at communion, we realize this.

Again, the reason we give is not so that God might love us or someone else might notice us, but because God already has noticed us and loved us in Jesus Christ.

And we kneel and worship God not because of what he might do, but because of what he has done.

And communion is our weekly reminder of this: to sit in the broken body and blood of Jesus Christ to be reminded of the sacrifice that he gave for us, that Jesus, as we bow to him, is not the domineering master who is pleased that all his subjects are kneeling to him and he starts to command them various things.

No, that is not the God of the Bible.

The God of the Bible is the lowly one, the humble one, the one who, though he is the master and the king, became the servant and the slave of all humanity, who died on the cross, was punished for the sins that we should be punished for, taking our place, substituting his very life for us, which makes us now receive his life freely through communion, worship, repentance, sanctification, and to lead the life that God desires you to live.

Wherever you are at today, are you burned out?

It's time to receive the purpose of your life through the gospel and to have this communion preached to you, to remind you that it is not about what you will break and bleed over.

It is about what he has broken and bled over, which is you.

He's given his life for you.

So receive freely this gospel and this good news, and may we not live for some kind of future approval, but sacrifice and give, knowing that God has already approved of us because of Christ.

The song we're about to sing says this: Jesus paid it all, and all to him I owe.

Make sure you get the order right.

Let's pray.

Jesus, we desperately desire for you to work in us that which we cannot work for ourselves.

Jesus, you paid it all.

All to you we owe.

But can we sit God during communion in the purpose?

God, I pray for my church family here.

Um I I don't know where everybody's at today, but I sense your Holy Spirit leading us to repentance.

Uh, to give up terrible, cheap, flimsy purposes that we are sacrificing for.

God, I sense that you are trying to unearth for us the plastic purposes for which we sacrifice.

Our work, our future, possibilities, all these things we want to be maybe noticed for and known for or seen.

Um God, help us see your kingdom, help us see your gospel this morning.

I can't do that.

You have got to illuminate the hearts and minds of us as your people.

God, if we lack the posture and we are proud in our sacrificing, humble us.

Humble us right now in worship and in communion.

And God, if we are not along the right people, may we take a step into community in some way here at Awakening.

We need you.

We need that.

God, would you help us?

We pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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